It’s about Spring break time, so we’re headed south to the original Spring break destination of Fort Lauderdale, and to a little mall just to the west in suburban Lauderhill.  Walking into Lauderhill Mall is like walking into a time vacuum and being sucked back 30 (or more?) years.  It is not only a wonderfully-preserved example of retail times gone by, but it is possibly the most reliced property we’ve featured on this site which is still open - and not dead.  At any rate, we feel that Lauderhill is an appropriate foray into the retail scene of south Florida, a rapidly changing and exponentially growing place with a rich and unique retail history.   

This amazing relic sits on 40 acres of property along State Road 7 just north of Sunrise Boulevard in the small village of Lauderhill, just west of the city of Fort Lauderdale.  Opened in 1966, it was billed as the first air-conditioned mall in the southeastern United States.  Since opening, Broward County and south Florida in general have changed dramatically.  For one, the population of Broward County was only 350,000 in 1966.  Today it is 1.8 million and growing rapidly.  In addition, with the massive population growth came larger, more modern malls and big box centers.  These have effectively outmoded Lauderhill Mall and it has far outlived its original purpose.  The only reason it still exists is because it was purchased decades ago by a privately held Canadian partnership which has done very little to the mall at all, leaving it looking almost exactly the same today as it did the day it opened.  They do keep the place clean, however.

As far as tenants, or general information about the mall in general, little information is available.  As the mall lacks a website, even current information is relatively difficult to find.  Upon visiting the mall in January 2007, we discovered it was tenanted with many local and national retailers, many of which cater to an urban, lower-income market.  Despite no longer having anchors, Lauderhill Mall has a low vacancy rate.

Clearly, the main event of this mall is its sheer existence in the face of obsolescence.  We’re talking stores with cedar shingles, an ancient directory which is possibly several decades old and even yellowing due to age, mirror-backed storefronts, and wooden-flanked conversation areas with planters staged throughout the middle of the mall walkway.  There is nothing modern about this mall, and it is possibly one of the best-preserved retail relics still open today. 

But this won’t be the case for very long. 

As the story commonly goes for outdated retail, massive changes are afoot for Lauderhill Mall.  Announced in September 2006, it appears the wave of ”new urbanism” will flood Lauderhill with new residential, office, and retail.  This would, of course, involve tearing down most, if not all, of the 650,000 square-foot mall and replacing it with over 1 million feet of new space.  The demolition could start later this year, and is considered a vital linchpin in the revitalization of the Route 7 corridor between Miami and Broward County and points northward.  This redevelopment is all the result of the acceptance of an unsolicited offer to the Canadian partnership from a south Florida firm.     

So say goodbye to Lauderhill Mall, at least the Lauderhill Mall which has existed for more than four decades.  It’ll be gone after this year, but not before being documented here for perhaps the very first time.  That’s what we’re here for, anyway.  The pictures here were taken in January 2007 (though I probably could have told you 1977 rather convincingly).  If you know anything about the mall, specifically about the history and the anchors here, leave some comments and let us know. 

Apologies for the home state neglect. Let’s take a break from the Noo Yawka barrage with a mall that even a lot of people living in the Boston area may not know about.

The Walpole Mall is the only enclosed mall serving Boston’s southwest suburbs, along the US1 and I-95 corridor. There is another, larger enclosed mall in North Attleborough (the 1 million square foot Emerald Square Mall) but it’s so far from Boston that it’s really much more in the Providence suburbs, and there used to be a somewhat larger second mall–the Dedham Mall–on this corridor, but it was de-malled gradually from 2000 to 2003. That leaves this somewhat puzzling, 306,000 square foot ancillary mall by its lonesome, on a strip that always seems underdeveloped given its location.

(This is an old Papa Gino’s pizza logo. Isn’t papa great? It seems as though he’s holding barrels full of pizza for you.)

I’m actually hoping that some readers will chime in with a bit of the deeper history of the Walpole Mall, because I don’t know too much. My guess is that it was constructed in the mid-70s to the early ’80s, and its size and layout (basically a modified dumbell) is typical of many of the smaller, Bradlees-anchored malls that sprung up around New England at the time. The mall was given a pretty substantial facelift in 1997 through early 1998 that made it look roughly as it does now, with its strange mix of big box retailers and enclosed mall space. In 2001, management briefly announced a plan to expand the mall by over a million square feet by purchasing much of the residential property behind the mall, but this controversial proposal never came to fruition, disappearing without much of a trace. I specifically remember road trippin’ it up to this mall in early 1998 with some of my friends from high school because it had just been given one of New England’s first Old Navy stores, but that was my first ever visit to the place, and it looked then roughly the same as now. The Office Max store looks more like an old Ames than anything, but it seems to small to be an Ames. I don’t have a clue. The Kohl’s definitely used to be a Bradlees, but I’m a bit puzzled on the rest. Today’s anchors are Kohl’s, Barnes & Noble, Old Navy, Jo-Ann Fabrics, and Office Max.

By the way, there are a few malls along this way that have departed in the past few years, including the previously-mentioned Dedham Mall and the tiny Village Mall in Canton. If by any chance–and it’s a wild and crazy chance, I know–you have any pictures of any of these, I’d, y’know, really love to see them. Dedham was one of my favorites, you see, and now it’s much too late to save anything of note. The place is basically gone now, just a sad and disjointed mass of outward facing big box stores.

Howdy, folks.  It’s been a while.  Due to school, work, and a little R&R (not to mention some content generation for this website) on the east coast this past week we’ve been a bit busy.  Though fear not, we’ll churn up more interesting stuff for you to ponder well into the future.

Like the former Harding Mall in Nashville, Tennessee.

Opened in the 1960s, the 300,000 square foot Harding Mall was a small enclosed center featuring one major anchor and one junior anchor on the south side of Nashville.  In later years the major anchor was Dillards and the junior anchor was Marshalls, but we’re sure history dictated some changes here and there and that wasn’t always the case.  Over time, Harding Mall became eclipsed by larger, super-regional malls also in south Nashville like Hickory Hollow, The Mall at Green Hills, and Cool Springs Galleria.  All of the aforementioned are still moderately or extremely successful today, and draw shoppers from all over central Tennessee.  Harding Mall’s fate was sealed by this competition; it closed in 2005 and was promptly demolished following a few unsuccessful years repositioned with tenants catering to the spanish-speaking market.  By Summer 2006 it was replaced by a shiny new Wal-Mart Supercenter.  Not shocking, not even a unique situation, but a bit sad nonetheless. 

Harding Mall scored design points for its general shape and decorative accoutrements.  The mall space itself wrapped around the large Dillards anchor on three sides, creating a C-shape.  Marshalls hung off to one end, and a cool backlit fountain was somewhere near the middle of the mall.  The rest of the center was somewhat dated as well, and the logo is pretty neat too. 

We visited in May 2001 during the mall’s major downswing, and at a time when smaller, ancillary enclosed malls began to fall out of favor in lieu of larger behemoths like the others nearby.  Check out the pictures of the mall while it was still around below, and also take a look at some demolition photos posted here.  And, feel free to share a few of your own memories and opinions as well. 

A marvel of the 21st century is that Labelscar has a great little tool called web analytics where I can see (amongst other things) the search terms that people use to access our site. While I generally keep my day job separate from my goings-on as a mall geek, I don’t mind mentioning that I work in the burgeoning search marketing industry, which is really just a long-winded way of saying that I find the *way* that people find us to be sort of fascinating. But beyond that, sometimes it gives me good leads on retail-related news.

It was based on such a query that caused someone to stumble upon this site–something about “new mall hudson”–that lead me to find that W/S Development, a well-known New England developer of lifestyle centers, recently introduced the proposed lifestyle center to end all others, a gigantic riverfront development to be built on the site of a current golf course in Hudson, New Hampshire.

At first glance, I can see some pluses and minuses of this project, although admittedly I haven’t seen many of the details about it. First, the good: despite that it’s a lifestyle center, it appears to replicate a genuine streetscape, with blocks and neighborhoods (including a fashion-oriented “Pavilion Buildings” neighborhood, and a more nightlife-centric “Theater District,” amongst others), a riverfront performing arts theater and resort hotel, a residential component, and a variety of other features. In essence, this is a brand new, destinational downtown for the deep suburbia of the Merrimack Valley, a place that will serve as a super-regional destination for all of the densely populated suburbs stretching north of Boston (and into New Hampshire) for 60 miles. That could be sort of neat.

The bad, of course, is notable. The immediate thing that jumps to mind is that the site–while currently somewhat off the way, retail-wise, is very close to the Daniel Webster Highway in Nashua, along with the Pheasant Lane Mall, which is currently one of the largest retail strips in all of New England. While I’ve learned from the guys at Freakonomics that these things tend to do better when clustered together (rather than spaced apart, as you might think), it still seems that the sheer magnitude of this project–which is being touted as the largest mall in New England, thus implying the square footage will exceed 2 million–will likely require that it steals a substantial amount of stores from the thriving Pheasant Lane Mall and its adjacent retail strip, setting the stage for another visit from Mr. Yuk. This is to say nothing of the impact to downtown Nashua and downtown Lowell, which like most older industrial cities have been staging a comeback, mainly in the form of new restaurants and entertainment.

And the other elephant in the room is the Tewksbury Mills project, whose status is unknown now that Mills is to be acquired by Simon. Will Simon want to move forward with the Tewksbury Mills project–which serves a more underutilized slice of the same portion of the metropolitan area–or will W/S Development’s much more ambitious and massive project be the ultimate retail winner, and what could it mean for the many surrounding retail developments?

The western flank of the Capital Region of New York is home to two enclosed malls, and originally there was three. Of these, one is the tiny–and not really functional–Amsterdam Mall in Amsterdam, in an area that resides somewhat outside of the metropolitan area. There were two other malls serving the Schenectady area: the Mohawk Mall, an atrociously frightening grey structure that served the city’s east side and which was demolished in 2000 or 2001, and Rotterdam Square, which sits just to the west of downtown, near the city’s massive GE Plant.

Rotterdam Square is a relatively typical mid-sized, mid-tier shopping mall, although I’ve always felt it was pretty neat. Like most of the malls around Albany, it has a massive (nearly Olympic-sized!) swimming pool, it has retained lots of in-mall planters, and it has a Sears with a red logo–a true rarity.

The 900,000 sqft Rotterdam Square is owned by the Macerich Company, the same management firm responsible for Wilton Mall, and sports Sears, TJMaxx, Sony-Loew’s Cinemas, Macy’s, and Kmart as anchors. From what I’ve been able to glean, this roster has been mostly static since the mall’s opening (at a date I can’t quite pin down, but I would estimate at the early to mid 1980s), with one notable exception. The current Macy’s space had been a Filene’s until the May-Federated merger, and prior to 1995 was a Hess’s department store.

Like Wilton Mall, Rotterdam Square seems to mostly get by due to its relative isolation from the region’s two powerhouse malls: Crossgates Mall and Colonie Center.